The EMDAT database provides valuable information on human and financial losses from natural disasters around the world. Some of the issues with the EMDAT data are lack of entire data accessibility, static and inconsistent summary reports, and the lack of auxiliary financial and demographic data. The emdatr package addresses some of these issues. Major updates in emdatr v0.2:

Data has been updated to include the whole of 2013.

Data is now hosted on bitbucket.org and only a sample is provided with the package. Package has the functionality to extract the entire data.

A new vignette which explains the raw data clean-up and enhancement procedure and which also demonstrates use of the package.

Here is the emdatr package home page on CRAN. Below is a summary graphic on number of natural disasters by decade obtained using the package.